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Selling a Book by Its Cover

Thatcher Wine wraps books in jackets of his own design for libraries he creates for clients.Credit
Jamie Schwaberow for The New York Times

IT took Thatcher Wine a year to amass 2,000 well-preserved white vellum and cream-colored leatherbound books for a “gentleman’s library” in the Northern California estate of a private equity manager. Perfectly matched sets of books bound in antique vellum, a pale leather made from goat or sheep skin, are an elusive quarry, especially if they all have to be in English, said Mr. Wine, a former Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative “book solutions,” as he puts it, in his Boulder, Colo., warehouse.

“German is easy — it’s easy to find a complete set of vellum Goethe in the original German,” he said. But Mr. Wine had to search long and hard to find clean copies of authors like Thackeray, Galsworthy and Conrad. For this client was after more than pretty bindings: he wanted the option of being able to read his books.

The young Upper East Side client of Jenny Fischbach, a design partner at Cullman & Kravis Inc., the tony Manhattan decorating firm, was similarly inclined. She wanted literary classics mixed with art books for a silver-inflected art library. So Mr. Wine chose works by Kate Chopin, Jane Austen and Robert Browning and wrapped them in matte silver paper, to match the silver hardware in the room.

Not all of Mr. Wine’s clients, who include hotel designers and high-end builders, are so fastidious about content. For the spa in Philippe Starck’s Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, he was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a “textural accent” to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets — titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel, or biographies of Michael Jackson, he said — because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.

Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves — lots and lots of shelves — and turning to companies like Mr. Wines’s Juniper Books for help filling them.

Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.

It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé, who has collaborated with Bennett Weinstock, a Philadelphia decorator known for his English interiors, on some of his libraries. Mr. Weinstock still shops in London to find just the right leatherbound look, he said. “Some people will insist that they be in English, because they want them to look as if they could read the books,” Mr. Weinstock said. “Others don’t care what language the books are in as long as the bindings are beautiful.”

Even a modernist builder like Steve Hermann in Los Angeles, who makes sleek multimillion-dollar houses for buyers like Christina Aguilera, includes acres of shelves in his high-end spec houses. Mr. Hermann designed a glassy Neutra-like house with a 60-by-14-foot shelving system, which has room for 4,000 books, he said.

“But who has 4,000 books?” he said. “I always stage my houses, so it was up to me to fill the shelves.” He ordered 2,000 white-wrapped books from Mr. Wine and deployed them in tidy, horizontal stacks (watch for the white-wrapped book to become this year’s version of the deer head).

Why build such huge shelves?

“I could have hung art,” Mr. Hermann said. “But I like the textural feeling of shelves, and of books on display.”

So did the buyer: the place, books included, sold for $6.4 million to a British man in the fashion business.

The old practice of buying yards of leatherbound law journals or Swedish medical texts for an instant library is out of favor. “I don’t think you should have law journals unless one of you is actually a lawyer,” Mr. Weinstock said.

Instead, some designers are finding ever more elaborate ways to tweak books their clients already own. Peter Pennoyer, a New York architect, is designing wooden boxes that look like perfectly bound books (“in sort of a tomato-soup-with-cream color,” he said) to contain an unruly looking collection of literary classics owned by a client.

“A book is a meaningful, sensory experience,” he pointed out. “If we buy her all new Trollope, then she’s suddenly looking at a volume that’s foreign, that doesn’t smell right or have the typeface that’s familiar. If she doesn’t have the memory of having read the book, it’s not going to mean the same thing. My thought is to elevate all these mismatched bindings and put them in these containers, so it all looks uniform and pretty, but the client can keep the books she’s loved for decades.”

Other designers say their clients are asking for more personalized content: color-coordinated regional histories, for example, or Western-themed titles with punchy, early 20th-century jackets.

Alexa Hampton, the New York decorator, remembers her father, Mark Hampton, buying “masses of random, leatherbound books to assemble libraries,” she said. “But the people I work for don’t want books just as backdrop or theater, which they did 20 years ago. Now they want books they actually might read.”

Two weeks ago, Ms. Hampton and a foreign client for whom she is decorating an Upper East Side pied-à-terre spent a morning at the Strand, picking out histories and antique sports books for a dining room, and contemporary fiction and biographies for the bedroom. “When people are reading less,” Ms. Hampton said, “you think more people would say, ‘Just fill it with books and make it pretty.’ Instead, they are very involved.”

It’s not always practical to haul the client off to a bookstore, however. Jenny McKibben, who runs the book-by-the-foot business at the Strand (which now accounts for 5 percent of the store’s sales, she said) takes mostly phone and Internet orders.

Designers at the Rockwell Group asked for Rat Pack biographies, gambling and other “Sin City themes,” she said, more than 1,000 books to spread about the 110,000-square-foot casino and 2,995 rooms of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, the new casino resort there.

The designers of the new Bowlmor, on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, envisioned the place as a TriBeCa loft — minimal and modern — and asked for a collection “that was young, fun and hip.” Ms. McKibben said she procured “100 feet of brightly colored books on music, film, cars, games, retro-themed fun and, of course, bowling,” though the blizzard last month interfered with installation.

For a massive beach house in South Carolina decorated by Ms. Fischbach, Mr. Wine interviewed the clients at length to gauge their appetites in sports, fiction, politics and religion. He asked Ms. Fischbach about their art — Robert Motherwell, Rothko, Agnes Martin — so he could find monographs on the artists. He researched the area, too, and prescribed a mix of regional histories.

“I think I’m pretty good at extrapolating tastes from a small amount of information,” said Mr. Wine, who created a collection of 4,000 books, packed them up in boxes labeled by room and topic — contemporary mysteries, for example, for the front hall — and sent them off to the house to be unpacked and styled by Ms. Fischbach.

As she put it: “Architects build so many shelves into new construction — it adds warmth and their aesthetic stamp. Thatcher is a necessity at this point in these large homes,” she said, ticking off five projects on which she and Mr. Wine have collaborated. “I couldn’t pull off filling these miles of bookshelves without him.” For his work, Mr. Wine charges from $80 to $350 a foot. The rare vellum is more pricey, at about $750 a foot; the Northern California library he did for the private equity manager cost about $80,000, he said.

In the custom book business, you might call Mr. Wine a designer label and the Strand, ready-to-wear (prices there start at $10 a foot and range up to $400 for antique leather).

The Maryland-based Wonder Book, then, with its 54,000-square-foot warehouse, represents the mass market. Chuck Roberts, its amiable owner, said he gets requests from developers, set designers, decorators needing 1,000 books for a holiday deadline, even wedding planners.

“We’ve had a great year — it’s broken all records,” Mr. Roberts said, noting that his book-by-the-foot business now represents almost 20 percent of his total sales. Though “earth tones” are his bestsellers, he said, last week a national builder asked for light blue and gray books to stage multiple homes. A TV news program wanted linen-wrapped books chopped in half to fit the shallow, faux-shelves of a political interview program. And on Tuesday, a Chicago restaurant called for 100 linear feet of distressed clothbound books. “Must be there by Monday!” Mr. Roberts said.

Federico Uribe, a Colombian conceptual artist working in Miami, is another big customer. He has ordered thousands of books in primary colors to make energetic sculptures of palm trees and boa constrictors. (“Most people destroy trees to make books,” Mr. Uribe said. “I destroy books to make trees. I like that the books are telling a story in a different language.”)

Mr. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It’s a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf.

“It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt,” Mr. Kidd said. “You don’t have to redesign the jacket; the jackets have been designed. This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”

LAST year, Restoration Hardware sold a decorative product called a book bundle. It was a fascinating modern relic, even a fetish item — a clutch of books with rough edges and the covers ripped off, stitched with twine. The company’s Web site described it rather winningly: “Liberated from their covers, stitched and bound together with jute twine, the foxed and faded pages of old books become objets d’art.”

The bundles, “rich with texture and intrigue,” were sold for $29, and evoked much ridicule from bloggers around the country. They have since been discontinued.

As of this week, however, you can find a similar product, created by an abashed Mr. Wine for Pottery Barn, though it is a bit less atmospheric (somewhat less rich with intrigue, as the copywriters might say) and priced $10 higher.

“I’m not so proud of these, but they do make the point that you can do a lot with books,” said Mr. Wine, who used midcentury editions of forgotten authors or books on subjects like flower arranging, health and religion.

As it happens, the-book-as-relic was forecasted by marketers. Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting for JWT New York, the marketing and advertising agency, noted in her trend report for the coming year that “objectifying objects,” she said, “would be a trend to watch.”

Quoting from her report, she added: “Here’s what we said: ‘The more that objects become replaced by digital virtual counterparts — from records and books to photo albums and even cash — watch for people to fetishize the physical object. Books are being turned into decorative accessories, for example, and records into art.’ ”

Ms. Mack added that she was working with a decorator to “refresh” her own Manhattan apartment, and was hoping to decorate lavishly with books. She wondered if she might stack her books and turn them into legs for a coffee table.

“Then,” she said, “I can put my Kindle on top.”

Correction: January 13, 2011

An article and a picture caption last Thursday about books as interior-design objects misstated the size of the spa library shown in the Icon Brickell condo tower in Miami. There are 1,500 volumes, not 2,000.

A version of this article appears in print on January 6, 2011, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Selling a Book by Its Cover. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe